🇺🇸 Carissa Yip

She was ten years old when she defeated her first grandmaster. Not a weak grandmaster, not a grandmaster in a rapid game or a blitz event designed to give juniors exposure — a real grandmaster, in real competition. Carissa Shiwen Yip, born September 10, 2003, to parents from Hong Kong and mainland China who had made their home in Massachusetts, had been playing chess for a handful of years. She had been winning with alarming consistency. The grandmaster, whoever he was, presumably expected a difficult junior opponent. He got something considerably more than that. That game is not a footnote in Yip's career. It is the first page.

Her father Percy Yip was from Hong Kong; her mother Irene, née Cheng, from mainland China. Chess was not simply an activity in the Yip household — it was a serious undertaking, structured and supported from the earliest years. Carissa took to it with an appetite that quickly outpaced the local competition and then the regional competition and then, as she entered her teenage years, the national competition. The 2018 US Junior Championship, which she won at fifteen, placed her in the company of other elite young American players. She won that too.

In October 2019, at sixteen years, one month, and eighteen days old, Carissa Yip became the youngest American female player in history to earn the title of International Master. The record was set at the SPICE Cup tournament, and it entered the record books with the kind of precision that FIDE statistical history rewards: youngest, female, American, IM. She was still in high school. The record stood until June 2023, when Alice Lee surpassed it — but for nearly four years, Yip's sixteen-year-old self held it. She was also, in September 2019, the top-rated female player in the United States, regardless of age.

Then came Saint Louis. The US Women's Chess Championship is held annually at the Saint Louis Chess Club — one of the most generously funded and well-organized chess venues in the world — and it draws the strongest female players in the country. Yip first entered the event as a young teenager and began accumulating experience against players who had competed at the senior level for longer than she had been playing the game. In 2021, she won for the first time. In 2023, she won again, in a championship she claimed with a single brilliant final-round performance against the defending champion. In 2024, she did something that had not been done before: she started the tournament with eight consecutive wins — an 8/8 start that no player in the event's history had achieved — and then won the championship with a round to spare, finishing at 8.5/11. It was, by any measure, the most dominant performance in the history of the US Women's Championship.

She graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts — one of the country's most elite prep schools — in 2022, and enrolled at Stanford University to study Computer Science and Mathematics and Computational Science. She continued competing at the highest level of women's chess while enrolled as a full-time student at one of the world's most demanding academic institutions. In November 2025, she took a gap year from Stanford to pursue chess full-time, determined to push toward the grandmaster title — the next frontier for someone who has already won everything available at the national women's level.

She is 21 years old, a four-time national champion, and still pursuing the formal title that would place her unambiguously among the world's strongest female players. Carissa Yip has been doing remarkable things since she was ten. She has given no indication that she intends to stop.